Starmer’s purge of Britons like Thatcher would make Stalin jealous

What a joyless fellow Keir Starmer is. He warned us before the election that he never dreams. Now he is demonstrating his signal lack of imagination by stripping from the walls of No 10 yet more portraits of our nation’s great and good.

This is more than simply a matter of taste, though. Starmer is dispensing with celebrated Britons with a political zeal that would make Stalin himself jealous. In the 1930s the Soviet dictator and his apparatchiks infamously airbrushed photographs to remove anyone who had been deemed undesirable, in an attempt to purge them from history once and for all.

The latest two the Prime Minister has bumped off are Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh. By ditching the marvellous Ditchley Portrait of the Virgin Queen, he has removed one of the very great portrait paintings in the history of art.

She is pointing to a globe – yes, horror of horrors, she wanted Britain to have influence beyond its own shores. She encouraged explorers, she was the driving force behind the colonisation of America and is the chief reason why English is the language of America, rather than Spanish.

Now Sir Keir Starmer is demonstrating his signal lack of imagination by stripping from the walls of No 10 yet more portraits of our nation’s great and good, writes AN Wilson

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and his apparatchiks infamously airbrushed photographs to remove anyone who had been deemed undesirable, to purge them from history forever

Elizabeth I was, it must be said, an early supporter of the slave trade which perhaps informed Starmer’s decision to get rid of her. Meanwhile, Sir Walter Raleigh – the national hero who helped in the victory over the Spanish Armada of 1588 – committed the sin of trying to establish a British settlement in North Carolina.

Of course, only a puritan would imagine that figures from the past would be entirely untouched by the sins of their own time. Only someone without the faintest notion of historical perspective would consider these great Britons to be unacceptable.

I doubt if Starmer cares or knows about history. Someone will have told him that Queen Elizabeth encouraged the slave trade, and that Raleigh did the same. Time for Starmer to run for cover in case he is accused by the woke brigade of condoning that evil business.

And so the Virgin Queen and Raleigh have gone – replaced with some horrendously gloomy paintings by the 20th century Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego.

Rego’s a great painter but in these two pictures all the sunshine ends and stormy weather rages. They used to adorn the restaurant at the National Gallery. When I ate there, and looked at the sad blue and grey images, my spirits never soared.

One of the paintings depicts a most joyous moment in the Christian story – when the Virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth meet and realise they are both bearing babies in their wombs.

Babies who turn out to be Jesus and John the Baptist. Yet in Rego’s version, these happy mothers-to-be look as dismally unhappy as if they have just heard Rachel Reeves’s Budget.

Starmer has also removed a picture of the most radical PM of the 19th century, William Gladstone, who very nearly achieved the impossible by bringing peace to Ireland, but who also – as he penitently acknowledged – owed his family fortune to his father’s plantations in the Caribbean.

First to go in the cull, though, was Margaret Thatcher, whose portrait  was removed in August from a study in No 10 because, said Starmer, he did not like ‘people staring down at him’ – an explanation that sounds at once dishonest and as if he has an inferiority complex.

The truth is, political giants such as Queen Elizabeth I and Mr Gladstone would have every right to look down on him – with scorn, contempt and horror at what he is trying to do to our country.

Meanwhile, next door at No 11, Rachel Reeves has had all the paintings removed from the state rooms and said she only wants pictures by or of women. That might make you think she is sticking up for women’s rights, but don’t forget this is a party that isn’t even sure what a woman is.

You might say it is a trivial thing, pictures on a wall. But it is symbolic of the Great Purge which Starmer and his cronies intend to inflict on this country for as long as they are in office.

It is becoming clearer by the day that the PM is determined to rewrite the nation’s history in his own joyless image.